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by lawl 1832 days ago
I don't mind ads if they're not intrusive or even useful.

HN has ads, in the form of job listings for YC companies. They don't bother me in the slightest, and if i lived in the US they might even provide value to me.

The hundreds or thousands of ads i'd see if i'd surf without an adblocker do not.

Maybe you do have a product i'm interested in and don't know about. But there's not hundreds of things i'm going to buy every month.

If it was like: here's 5 products we think might be highly relevant to you every month. Sure, sign me up.

But it's (almost) never that. Most of the time the entity selling ad slots realizes, hey, if we sell more ad slots, we make more money. So they keep pushing the button to get a reward. Until they die because they overdosed on ads.

2 comments

I tend to agree, although I hate ads on principle.

But there are a lot of things I hate and don't have to think about. I don't go around protesting the war because in my country that's not something I have to care about, for example.

But advertisers made me have to care. If I didn't have adblock, I'd be running JS from some unverified third party on every other site. Couldn't they restrict it to pictures? Of course not.

So now I have to care, and I'm not going to cooperate with advertisers, who - before adblock got so mainstream - were content to serve us literal viruses as long as someone paid them.

HN has ads, but don't I have to go searching for them to find them? I think it's Stack Overflow's ad model too. We'll curate a group of readers that are appealing to people seeking jobs, put up a "jobs" tab, and charge companies to list openings.
Nope, they're injected into the frontpage sometimes. It's the entries without an upvote button and comment page.
Ah, I see them now. That is a well done ad system. They even get around a default ad blocker.